


the hungry man whose place is in the past

by tnevmucric



Category: IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe, Comfort/Angst, Dialogue Light, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Loss of Parent(s), Reunions, Set in 2004, unbetad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-07
Updated: 2019-10-07
Packaged: 2020-11-24 09:21:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20905322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tnevmucric/pseuds/tnevmucric
Summary: it had apparently been quite a normal night for the tozier’s, the policeman said over the phone. they were driving back from dinner when another driver, an older woman, collided with them and caused their car to spin outwards into a tree. he didn't ask to see the bodies, and the policeman hadn't offered. he thinks there might've been a fair reason for that.





	the hungry man whose place is in the past

Moving ahead, Richie had occasionally saw what he thought were the brief glimpses of his childhood.

"Everyone deals with this differently", his therapist told him, trying to catch the attention of his unfocused eyes. There was a strange tension in the way she held her pen, between her middle and ring finger, poised but maybe too tightly. He wondered if she'd been taught not to use her left hand but rejected the practice, still unable to shake the habit. "It doesn't change the severity of the source, however. Some people just cope by over-exertion. It's never your fault."

He'd grown to like her, in their months of sessions; somewhat hoping she’d be proud of him if he were to become like her, her attentive demeanour appealing to a kind of parasitic need in his chest that he'd prefer to avoid speaking about. He'd be more lenient to smiling, however, and more willing to make others smile. Richie knows she'd call that _people-pleasing behaviour._

For a brief second he feels free. Perhaps there's something out there insistent on keeping him going, no matter the consequence, no matter how little he's eaten in the past 48 hours, because he comes back to Derry at age 28 and almost remembers a life he can't imagine having lived... and yet it weighs him down fiercely, like it’s found its own voice, and that free feeling dissolves. The short glimpses seemed more and more like solid artefacts as he drove slowly through the streets leading to his childhood home: a slow, gaining press of something intrusive making him rub at his neck.

_Memory_, his therapist had said, _it's going to work against you. Don't let it._

A group of kids cycle past his car, dressed in ugly cargo pants and something Richie thinks he read was called _'boho-chic'_ (something Richie thinks he's surely made fun during an 8 PM slot). George Michael loudly sings from a radio strapped to one of their backs and the birds in maple trees nearby screech too—_kiss as many as you want! my love's still available. _They all sing like they know the tune.

Richie turns up his own radio with a wince. Everything seems so awfully vivid that he wants to blame his maybe out-of-date eye prescription. It’s as if he shuddered 15 years back in time, too caught up in the latest hits and not caught up enough in the algebra test he's sure to miss because _x equals the amount of times I’ve fucked your mom._

He blinks, grips the steering wheel tighter. The kids disappear into a house on the corner, bikes abandoned and radio still playing—they'll regret wasting the battery later, Richie knows, but he focuses back on the road when his parents’ driveway pulls in to view. He should have visited more, probably should have called. They're meaningless regrets, now, ones only his therapist might hear if he gets drunk enough on his flight back to LA. _I should have come home for Christmas, at least once or twice._

It had apparently been quite a normal night for the Tozier's, the policeman said over the phone. They were driving back from dinner when another driver, an older woman, collided with them and caused their car to spin outwards into a tree. He didn't ask to see the bodies, and the policeman hadn't offered. He thinks there might've been a fair reason for that.

He sits stationary in the driveway for a long while. He should be upset, inconsolable—Hell, apparently the old lady got away scot-free. No, just two dead parents and leftover Chinese in the back seat, which only made him feel worse because Richie hated Chinese takeout ever since he was a kid: the food almost always too salty or too sweet. Maybe if he’d had it with them more they wouldn’t be dead right now—it’s a stupid thought, but it feels true. And he's not upset about it, he's just alone and trying to figure out if he should repress everything _now_ or _after_ he's through with the funeral (a little voice in his head tells him he's already doing it). There's no one to really invite anyway, his family had always been small and old and dying off with his parents seeming like an actual hope for the lineage. His mom had said it years ago: young and spry and having a son, everything seemed right for Went and Maggie Tozier.

Now there's only lukewarm _chow mien_ on the leather seats his dad had paid for out-of-pocket.

Richie digs the heels of his palms against his eyes, glasses pushing uncomfortably into his forehead. He hasn't worn frames in years, but now favours their anonymity. He's just a man crying in a driveway, a man wondering if his mom still has a bottle of her perfume or even some frozen brownies in the freezer. He thinks about the joint he taped to his ceiling fan and laughs until he realises he's sobbing. It's what he's meant to do, right?

* * *

  
They hadn't been bad parents, Richie begins to remember as he sifts through boxes of old family keepsakes, clad in Spider-Man pyjama pants he thinks are maybe 4 sizes too small and a shirt that smells like the weed he bought in 1993. They hadn't been the most affectionate of parents, especially as he'd grown up, but that hadn't been their fault. Like his mother said, they were _young_—Richie was young. They wanted to travel and see the world and follow careers and dreams; when Richie was old enough to be left alone in the house, well, he couldn't blame them for not being around. Derry was a shithole.

He's got his dad's Billy Joel record playing from the kitchen and it feels like home, sort of. He's smoked through a carton of his dad's cigarettes, too, and added to the calamity of his outfit by wearing his mother's favourite cardigan (the one that’s a colour he keeps forgetting the name of, the one she’d wear on her birthday and at the start and end of every Sunday)—it smells like her and it's nice. He might keep it. It makes him look like her.

He really does look like her, he realises belatedly, tapping another cigarette into the glass tray by his feet, shifting another photo album into his lap and shoving his glasses up his nose clumsily. He's never noticed it before, or never wanted to, but he sees it. He does.

Earlier, he had hesitated in their bathroom. With a bottle of Cacharel’s _Lou Lou_ in hand and toes wiggling against the cold tiles, still painted red from last month when he was watching the new episode of Survivor with a box of Greek takeout and a Gatorade, it didn’t seem right to take or touch anything more—but his mom had left her pink scrunchie by the sink. The one she'd wear in bed and lose in the morning.

He touches it now, nestled in tight curls he once wanted to cut off.

He sees it now, he wants to tell Maggie Tozier. _I see you now._ And he has his fathers eyes, no matter how much they might've scared him when he was 15. _I have both of you with me._

It feels horrifying.

He cries so hard that he's almost convinced he can taste the cold medicine he would take when he was 4 or 5; that sickly white liquid that was meant to be orange flavoured but only made him gag and bite down on the syringe much to his mother's chagrin.

He cries some more.

* * *

  
He dreams of a dream from 1992. _I’ll do anything for my sweet sixteen_, he remembers singing. _I’ll do anything, for little run away child._

As Richie Tozier would fall asleep, Eddie Kaspbrak would die.

It became a consistency in his nighttime routine, sharply known on the flat of his tongue as bile and bitter saliva when he would inevitably wake up and shudder into his waste-basket, sobbing and ears burning while his heart pounded against his rib cage. The first time it happened, he could barely speak to Eddie the following morning. Swallowing shallow and stuttering, he gave Big Bill a run for his money.

Eddie’d frown at him often on these days after nights, touching his wrist when no one was looking and tilting his head with a concern Richie was never fond of: "What happened?", he'd ask, because if Eddie knew one thing about Richie Tozier, it was that he _knew_ Richie Tozier. Head to toe, left to right, from the birthmark beneath his elbow to the beauty mark on his left shoulder. When Eddie asked, Richie would think about what to say—really, _really_ think... and Eddie wouldn't ask after that.

There was a day Eddie had nudged his arm as they trailed their bikes over the Kissing Bridge, glancing from the corner of his eye and pensive.

"You can talk to me, Rich. If you want."

It'd been simple as that—and he _did_ want, but how would he have said it?

_Every night I close my eyes I see you get stabbed by some kind of fucking spike. Except it's not you, it's some man with your eyes and I'm not me, except those are my glasses and that's your freckle on your cheek._

"I know", he'd end up nodding, before launching into an anecdote or joke that he can't remember anymore.

(And if Richie had always managed to avoid attention coming to the crude _R+E_ carved into the bridge, then that's his business, and his alone.)

It all feels stupid now, staring up at his old ceiling in a room untouched and unmoved since he'd said goodbye to his parents at 18; the unspoken _you always have a place here _stinging worse than the time he'd fallen into a bush of nettles and Eddie had pestered him for a full week. He blinks quickly at a poster of Lou Reed, breathing raspy and tears quickly forming.

The bed is too small, the room so messy and unclean, but he doesn't want to touch it, he wants to save the memento. He wonders if his mother felt the same, wonders if his father kept his favourite cereal in the cupboard all this time in the hopes that he'd visit, that now—that _finally_ time had caught up with them—a relationship could be formed.

He can hear the needle of the record clicking downstairs. It feels imminent.

He hates himself, quietly.

* * *

He rolls his bike out into the driveway at midnight with a deepening grimace, leaning it against his car and standing back to assess the damage. He eyes the low seat and feels doubt well in his gut—he hasn't ridden a bike in years, doesn't trust himself let alone the steering to even attempt it, but finds himself balancing over it anyway.

He knows the fear is irrational when he delays putting his hands on the handle bars, pulling his mom's periwinkle cardigan tighter around himself instead and letting his legs and feet take the brunt of his weight. It's cold outside, and the warmth of the shower lingers somewhere in his clothes. He glances down the street; it's dark out, reminiscent of other midnights spent sneaking up to Eddie's house or even Stan's when familial comfort was needed most. He could easily be home by 6 if he wanted to linger in town, not that he had any kind of curfew to abide by. He glares at the bike.

He's pedalling down the street in no less than a moment.

* * *

  
Dangling his feet over the edge of the quarry feels like a breath of fresh air and the promises of another time.

They've put up a 'no jumping' sign that Richie can't get in the mood to ignore so he pulls at the grass instead, glancing at his hands and expecting a scar there, some kind of memorabilia from time—but no such scar exists, and if it did it must have faded.

He's too scared to go to the bridge just yet. He’s too afraid to see if the clubhouse is still there or if they kept that terrifying monument of Paul Bunyan. He hasn't even considered that maybe—just _maybe_ someone still lives in Derry... but that felt unlikely. They all wanted out. _New York, Florida, Vancouver_—wherever. So long as they weren't here. So long as Derry didn't exist.

He holds his arms against himself, digging his fingers into his biceps and curling his feet up against the dirt. If his parents came here as teens, he'd never thought to ask. _They grew up here too_, Richie reminds himself. And their parents before them.

He wants home. He wants Derry to exist again.

"... Richie?"

Beverly Marsh is terrible tequila and Blondie mixtapes with the taste of chocolate-covered licorice twists and stolen cigarettes. He stumbles to a stand and her grin is as wide and as precious as he remembers, painted with a shimmery gloss and cut with a small scar she’ll later tell him she received by tripping off of the deck at some Californian beach.

Her hugs are the same, all _shoulders first_ and _stepping into your space_—but tighter, maybe. Though Richie thinks that might just be the affect of time. She's proudly grown a few good inches but the top of her head still only reaches his nose and he jokes about it, ready to spiral all over again because she's here, Richie remembers her, and she remembers him.

"You look like shit", is the second thing she says to him when she pulls away, her hands on his shoulders framing him in front of her. "I like the glasses, though, definitely better than the coke-bottle ones."

Richie hugs her again, he can't help it. Hiding his face in her neck feels like another home recovered—they must've sat like this for hours, before, smoking cigarettes to their filter and gossiping about Greta Bowie even if it made them hypocrites. He remembers sitting on the floor of the clubhouse with her as she leafed through collage applications—_My happiness is what matters most_, he remembers her saying, _I have to remember that. Remind me to remember that._

He'd reminded her of that not two minutes later. She only smiled.

Bev does tear up when she finds out why he's in town, pulling her arm around his back and leaning her cheek on his head as the day comes to a quiet 4:30 AM. Their legs sink into the grass and the absence of five others aches like Richie's taken a beating. When he asks, Bev says she's only in town out of sheer coincidence, that she'd finally gotten a break from work and had only meant to drive for a little while, soon finding herself in the last place she'd expected.

"Everything came back so slowly but it was like—like _muscle memory_", she explains. "It was like something pulled me here. I'm _glad_ it pulled me here." She jostles his shoulder with that same grin. "I've heard you on the radio so many times but it never clicked. Who knew you'd actually end up being funny."

She laughs for the two of them and an easy tire rests over Derry. 5 AM. It's familiar and warm, and the chill of the night prior subsides from his bones. Bev quietly says that it seems so much more peaceful than before, Richie doesn’t have the heart to remind her that the world has changed since then.

"What do we have here?"

Mike Hanlon is unfairly handsome. Richie blurts it out just as himself and Beverly finally let the broader man out of their grasp, Mike laughing deeply with a squint reminiscent of his teen self.

"Can't say the same for you.”

Mike never left Derry. He tells them that things seemed to always get right in the way at the wrongest of times, but that he's happier. At peace. “Derry’s changed a lot in, what, 15 years? It’s better now. Not great, but a whole lot better.” He enjoys his life and makes his rounds up to the quarry every morning at 5 o'clock sharp just to watch the birds.

"I can't believe I almost forgot you all", he says later with a quiet kind of awe, hands behind his head and legs kicked out in front of him. "I mean- _how could I?_ I can't believe myself."

"Subconsciously you kind of didn't", there's a twinkle in Beverly's eye as she flips through the sketchbook he'd been holding: Richie spots a well-drawn chickadee. "Stan, huh?"

Mike's head thumps to the grass.

"Wow, I pined after him even when I forgot he existed."

"You're a lovesick fool, my friend."

"Beep beep, Rich."

One by one, everyone seems to come back. Richie watches them fumble in through the trees—after Mike it's Ben: Ben who is rising in the architecture world and Ben who has a very chiseled jawline (Ben whose expression melts into pure adoration at the sight of one Beverly Marsh). After Ben, Stan’s almost characteristic eye roll is the first greeting to flicker into place at the sight of Richie trying to do a handstand at the edge of the quarry. Richie falls, of course, half-wishes he had fallen into the water if only cause more laughter among them, but the short shriek from Bev and Stan's biting comment is enough for now (and when they hug, he’s sure to hug Stan a little tighter. A little something like: _you're here._ A little something like: _living was hard and you're here._)

Bill is second last, and the laughter Richie craved boomed tenfold. Bill's ponytail makes them roar—Bev in stitches with Ben while Mike cackles on his back, an amused smile from Stan soaring his way when Bill crosses his arms in a very _Bill _way that has Richie flinging them to the ground in a hug.

It turns into a dog pile. It feels right.

Bill shows pictures of his girlfriend, Audra, and tells the story of their _love-at-first-sight_ in London. She's an actress and seems to adore him as much as he does her and he plans to propose to her before the end of June. They've all grown up. Mike talks about their big renovations for the library and Stan adamantly claims he enjoys accounting and Ben talks about an article he was mentioned in for Time Magazine and Beverly jokingly brags about her clothing line and

Eddie hasn't arrived. It's 10:35 and Richie honestly expected better. If almost all of them can pick up on this _psychic link_ then surely Eddie can. _Surely_ Eddie can tell they're all here, _surely_ Eddie can sense, in some way, that Richie Tozier needs a shoulder to cry on, even when he already has five sets of sympathetic eyes turned his way at the words _my parents died last Thursday._

Save Mike and Richie himself, they all seem to have booked rooms at the only motel Derry has to offer. Eddie doesn't show up when they decide to leave and and he tries to laugh, shake it off, but he's just shaking and he feels alone again. This coincidence has set him off kilter and the coincidence can't even give him all it has to offer. If it couldn’t get any better, Bev demands they meet for dinner, _at that old Chinese place_, because _where else_ would coincidence lead him.

Richie nods, however, and hugs them all again. He takes off with grin that feels like slime in his mouth and lets his weight shift unevenly over the bike, lets divine fate (_"Don't call it divine fate, we just all happened to have the same idea to come here. It happens. Human brains are ridiculously simple."_) take him to where he needs to be.

Divine fate takes him to the Kissing Bridge.

A cosmic joke leads Eddie straight there.

It almost hurts to look at Eddie, smile wide and crooked, decked in black as if he'd left a funeral and only reminding Richie of the one he's been left to plan. It makes him feel horribly vulnerable. Horribly open. He wonders how long Eddie's had his hand pressed by that premature _R+E_. It's 11:14.

He eyes the pink scrunchie in Richie's hair, the periwinkle cardigan, the glasses and most probably the age. _Time has passed_, he’d almost told Beverly, _but we feel like the same people_.

"Well, I can't say it doesn't suit you."

He hugs him, folds himself over Eddie because Eddie's body hasn't got the memo and kicked another few inches into his bones or whatever. This feels like drowning on his doorstep, drowning on the lounge room floor, drowning in his bed until he'd crawled into his parents' one. It feels like unbearable shaking and Eddie's hand on the lower part of his back and it feels like Eddie's jacket: sharp corners and neat stitching. Black.

"You're so fucking lanky", Eddie's breathy chuckle swims past his ear, "and you called me the lanky one, Jesus Christ."

Richie laughs brightly. Eddie feels coarser but not in an unkind way. There's more muscle on his shoulders, certainly more strength in his arms as he hugs Richie back, and he's changed his cologne; something that feels faintly upsetting but is immediately welcomed.

He's warmer, like cinnamon.

"I missed you", Richie whispers fiercely,"fuck, I _really_ missed you."

Richie remembers telling his therapist, once, maybe, about his dream of a dream of a _maybe_-memory.

_"I don't know who it's about, I know it's not real, but it pops up every now and again. Maybe it's symbolic"_, he'd waved a hand. _"I think I was kind of a fucked kid."_

_“What do you mean by that?”_

_"I don't remember much about it, I guess. What are dark caves and rods through chests symbolic of?"_

"What are you doing in town?", Eddie asks, pulling away from the hug but not pulling his hands away. "I didn't expect you to be here at all."

"We're all here", Richie rushes to reply. "We're _all_ fucking here, isn't that great? Fuck. We're having Chinese tonight—you're coming, right? Of course you are. _Shit_, I missed you-"

He hugs him again. He's shaking again. _Home_ was _home_ but home was _especially_ home when he’d sneak Eddie Kaspbrak up the stairs of his house while his parents were out of town or passed out sleeping in the lounge. Billy Joel on the record player, his mom’s perfume, and Eddie's spare inhaler in his bedside drawer. He almost cries when Eddie asks: _“Don’t you hate Chinese?”_

"I missed you." He says one more time, a weight off of his chest. A confession. He feels small when Eddie strokes the back of his neck, younger when he curls his fingers in even curlier strands of hair.

"It's good to be home, for once", Eddie replies. “Really.”


End file.
